What Now?

The prosecutor has finally broken the news to the Creach family, but the case isn’t closed yet.

The car bearing Spokane County Prosecutor Steve Tucker crunched over the gravel of the Plant Farm parking lot last Friday morning, not far from the spot where a sheriff’s deputy fired one fatal bullet in an encounter with the property’s armed owner last summer.

The August shooting created a firestorm of media coverage and community uproar over the fact that nurseryman and Baptist church pastor Wayne Scott Creach, 74, could be killed while checking on a suspicious car an unmarked police cruiser on his own property.

Creach’s death turned out to be the first in a cluster of seven shootings by local police agencies, five of them fatal. The latest was less than two weeks ago. (See p. 16.)

Tucker, looking more broad-shouldered than usual in a black leather duster and cowboy boots, was stone-faced as he walked past the spot where Creach died. He strode on, heading for the front door of the adjoining house where Creach’s widow, Imogene, and sons Alan and Ernie were waiting around the dining table to hear Tucker’s official ruling on whether murder charges would be filed against the officer.

The family had long expected Tucker to find that Deputy Brian Hirzel was justified in shooting Creach, who appeared to be drawing a gun on the officer during a tense encounter late at night.

“They had a lot of questions. They are not happy with the result. They wanted to see some charges out of this,” Tucker said when he left the house nearly an hour later.

“It was no surprise,” said a composed Imogene Creach, sitting at the head of the table.

Alan Creach added, “[Tucker] had told us early on that he had no plans to file charges, and now he’s finally come out and issued the statement that there will be no charges.”

The meeting was polite, both sides said, but difficult. “It’s tough to do this I haven’t had too much sleep the last couple of nights but I felt it was important for me to tell them in person before they heard it in the news or on TV,” Tucker said.

Despite the lack of surprise over Tucker’s ruling, the Creaches appeared deflated in its aftermath. They are still grieving, grappling with the sudden loss of Scott Creach, and searching for answers. They stopped short of saying they will sue the county or Hirzel.

“We started early on to perform an investigation,” Alan Creach says. “It’s
expensive, but I don’t have any intention of just stopping. Once we’ve
gathered all the information that can be gathered we’ll sit down and
make an educated decision on how to proceed.”

An
attorney they have hired to help with the investigation, former deputy
prosecutor Richard Wahl, was also in the house for the meeting with
Tucker.

Tucker has
six more of these cases headed for his desk. In each incident, officers
faced armed citizens who appeared to be threatening the lives of police
or other people.

The takeaway from Friday’s announcement, Tucker says: Obey the officer and put the weapon down. You can always argue later.

INTERNAL REVIEW

The
completion of the criminal review does not end the matter for Hirzel,
who has been assigned to desk work since the shooting. Sheriff Ozzie
Knezovich this week also began an internal review of the incident.

The
sheriff has named 12 officers to a deadly-force review board and has
also asked the department’s citizen review panel to monitor the process.

“I told them I want this to be complete, thorough and transparent,” Knezovich says.

He
says the review board will ask the Spokane Police Department, which
investigated the fatal shooting, for all its information. They will ask
the Creach family for any unanswered questions.

The
goal, he says, “is to answer how did we get to where we ended up that
night?” Fatal shootings, justified or not, take a toll, Knezovich says.
“I’m telling you that is the last resort. If that trigger is pulled,
there was nothing else to do. Our people understand this can never be
taken back once that bullet leaves the weapon it cannot be taken
back,” Knezovich says.

He
pulls out a fat, black binder full of news articles and thumps it down
onto the table. He jabs at it with a finger. “There are 89 stories in
here.”

Stories, Knezovich contends, that leave the impression his officers are prone to violence.

“Since
2004, we have had a half a million calls for service. We have used
force 1,000 times. Out of those 1,000, we’ve used deadly force, I
believe it is nine times and not all nine died,” the sheriff says.
“Does that not speak to the fact that our guys are literally talking
people down? You never hear about the individual who has the gun and
drops it, but that happens tons of times.”

THE CIVILIAN QUESTION

According
to Hirzel’s statements to Spokane Police detectives, he had backed his
dark blue, unmarked patrol car into the Plant Farm parking lot around 11
pm on Aug. 25 as a convenient spot to watch a house down the street
that had requested some extra eyes.

He was finishing
paperwork from an earlier traffic stop when he caught a light from the
corner of his eye and looked up to see a shirtless man approaching with a
flashlight and a handgun.

He became alarmed, Hirzel says, especially when the man did not respond to commands to stop or identify himself.

Most
of the deadly-force incidents that have plagued local law enforcement
agencies in recent months have involved people who have had criminal
records, or were involved in a call to police about a fight or domestic
violence, or who were reported to have mental health issues.

Not Creach. He was an elder in his church, deeply involved in helping others.

From a humble beginning with a flat of tomato plants, he built the Plant Farm over the years into a thriving, 26-acre nursery.

Hirzel
has said Creach advanced all the way to the driver’s door of the patrol
car, against the glare of the spotlight, before stepping back and
putting the gun, a .45-caliber, in the back waistband of his pants.

The
tense encounter seemed to be de-escalating. In his interviews with
detectives, Hirzel never says Creach identified himself as the owner of
the property, but instead repeatedly refused to comply with the deputy’s
commands to get on the ground.

When
the older man began to draw the gun from his waistband, Hirzel says he
felt his own life was in danger, and he shot from a few feet away.

Could not the deputy have bear-hugged Creach? Tripped him?

Kneed him? Was shooting the only choice?

“Yes,
it is the only option,” Tucker says. “Are you going to wrestle with
somebody with a gun? I’m not going to, and I wrestled in college. That
gun is coming out. In about a half-second it will be turned on you.
Officers are not obligated to take the first bullet.”

“What options do I have at that point, alone, in the dark, no one around me and he draws on me?”

TENSE OUT THERE

The
recent spike in officerinvolved shootings locally and statewide comes
in a larger context of violent encounters with police nationally.

Eleven police officers were shot just last weekend, including two in western Washington.

Tucker
and Knezovich point out a steep increase in police fatalities last year
162 killed in the line of duty in 2010, up from 117 in 2009.

Locally,
people have questioned whether officers have become overly sensitized
to potential threats after the ambush-avoidance training they’ve
received in the wake of the late-2009 killing of Lakewood, Wash.,
officers ambushed in a coffee shop.

Shortly before his encounter with Creach, Hirzel had undergone a training scenario in which he was ambushed in a patrol car.

“Lakewood
was a tragic event, but we’ve had Lakewoods before,” Knezovich says.
“What it is, quite frankly, is there’s an extreme amount of tension out
there. People are angry. People are fearful. They are angry they’ve lost
their job, or they are fearful they are going to lose their job.
Domestic violence is up. Take a look at the genesis of many of these
shootings, and it was domestic violence.”

The
internal review, he says, will not just focus on Hirzel’s actions. If
the training and policies of the agency contributed to the fatal
encounter, Knezovich says, they will be changed as well.

“When
someone is shot, it is horrible for the victim, it is horrible for
their families but it is also horrible for the officer,” Beggs says.
“They live with that for the rest of their lives. They are injured when
they kill somebody. We are not doing them any favors if we train them
only half-way.”

Tucker says he spoke with Hirzel on Jan. 18 to inform him there would be no criminal charges.

According
to Tucker, the deputy said, “When I found out there wasn’t a bullet in
the chamber [of Creach’s gun], that made me feel terrible. Then, I found
out he owned the property and that made me feel worse. And then I found
out he’s a pastor.”